For the last few years 99% of my personal computing has been handled on the iPad Pro. For the most part it was ok. Sometimes I would need to jump through some hoops to do things and occasionally I would fall back on my work Mac. The only item that has suffered in that time has been my ability to work on my personal website.

I tried several times to build workflows in shortcuts to enable me to do what I wanted, but most of the time they were buggy or didn’t quite work how I needed them too. Sadly, the outcome more often than not, was abandonment and my site fell into disrepair and neglect.

At the start of 2023 I decided I needed to revive some hobbies. One of the biggest, longest, and most enjoyable hobbies I’ve had has been running my own personal website or blog. So I’ve dusted off my old MacBook Pro and begun to play around once again. It’s been fun and refreshing and I now find myself wanting to write more as well. Having a thing that I’ve built as a home on the web seems to make a big difference in how much I want to write things to publish.

Sadly, using my MacBook Pro (from 2015) has shown me why I wanted to replace it with my iPad. I like the flexibility of the iPad, I can draw on it, I can write on it, I can do nearly everything I want to on it, except code and build a website. But my Mac is showing its age. It can’t run the latest version of macOS which makes me nervous. It means it will stop receiving security updates and apps will eventually not be able to receive updates. I’ve already experienced a couple having to roll back to older versions because they won’t run.

As a result the Apple website has become a place I visit often. The new M2 MacBook Air looks very appealing, but it’s not cheap, and given the current climate, out of reach at the moment. So I find myself eyeing my iPad Pro again. Then I get frustrated that I can’t do what I want to on it, which, when you think about the fact it has been around for over a decade, is kind of crazy that the device is still so hamstrung.

I know that bemoaning the state of the iPad a common theme at the moment, but I’m genuinely frustrated that the device continues to be held back by software deficiencies and design. It’s more than capable of doing all the things I can do on my old MacBook Pro in terms of hardware, but it remains shackled with one hand behind its back. For now I will continue to tinker with my site on my Mac, and then find ways to write and post to this site from my iPad. While I do that I’ll sit in hope that Apple eventually takes off the chains of iPadOS.

I’ve been feeling the desire to create more since the start of the year. I’m not sure if it’s just because it’s a new year which often brings with it a fresh vigour or whether it’s seeing some people I know have their artwork displayed in a local gallery. It creates a spark in me. A desire to create things.

I’m inspired.

Except.

When I sit down with my notebook and pencil or my iPad and Apple Pencil I don’t know what to draw. I know I want to draw something but I don’t know what. So instead I turn to Ulysses and I write something. That’s fine, I enjoy it, but I want to draw something. I want to create something visual. Maybe I’m out of practice. I’ve spent so many years creating websites and designs for other people that when it comes to creating something for myself I have no idea where to start. I’m paralysed by the blank page. So I’m finding myself trying to research the drawing process. What can I create and how do I work out what I want to create? Maybe it’s a case of picking up my pencil and drawing, letting it wander around the page and seeing what emerges? At the very least it would be a start. Some marks being made. Let’s see…

I’ve been feeling the desire to create more since the start of the year. I’m not sure if it’s just because it’s a new year which often brings with it a fresh vigour or whether it’s seeing some people I know have their artwork displayed in a local gallery. It creates a spark in me. A desire to create things.

I’m inspired.

Except.

When I sit down with my notebook and pencil or my iPad and Apple Pencil I don’t know what to draw. I know I want to draw something but I don’t know what. So instead I turn to Ulysses and I write something. That’s fine, I enjoy it, but I want to draw something. I want to create something visual. Maybe I’m out of practice. I’ve spent so many years creating websites and designs for other people that when it comes to creating something for myself I have no idea where to start. I’m paralysed by the blank page. So I’m finding myself trying to research the drawing process. What can I create and how do I work out what I want to create? Maybe it’s a case of picking up my pencil and drawing, letting it wander around the page and seeing what emerges? At the very least it would be a start. Some marks being made. Let’s see…

Over the last few weeks I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about social media and the open (indie) web. As people are fleeing Twitter and flocking towards Mastodon in an attempt to find a new way of doing social media some of the things that social media gets right keep cropping up in my feeds.

The first is that social media made it easy to follow people. Mastodon is not intuitive in how it handles following people across it’s many instances. RSS is great for following individual blogs as long as you have the necessary infrastructure in place (an account to act as a sync service and some apps to read in), but even then it’s not always easy to subscribe to the RSS feed of a website.

Go back a decade or so and browsers were heading in an interesting direction. Safari on the Mac had RSS built in and Firefox had a feature called live bookmarks. Both allowed you to “bookmark” a website and the browser would automatically use the RSS link it found on the site and notify you when there was an update. To me this is the most logical place to integrate RSS or a “follow” button for the internet. What was missing was some king of home page or feed akin to an RSS readers or that of Twitter. Browsers of today offer a great experience for browsing the open web, or at least starting a Google search and going from there. What I would like to see is a browser that places as much emphasis on bringing a social experience to the open web.

Imagine this… you are browsing the internet and come across a new blog, you’d like to follow it so you click the follow button in the header of that website. The UI of the website reflects that and your browser adds the website as website to it’s bookmarks. You close the browser and go off to do something else. A while later you come back, click on your browser icon and instead of being greeted by Google you are met with a feed reader type UI that shows you recent updates from the sites you follow. This is your curated space but it’s all tracked and kept in sync by your web browser not a social network. I think that would be an interesting way of handling social stuff on the web, the browser would be your home and not just a gateway to everything.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about social media and the open (indie) web. As people are fleeing Twitter and flocking towards Mastodon in an attempt to find a new way of doing social media some of the things that social media gets right keep cropping up in my feeds.

The first is that social media made it easy to follow people. Mastodon is not intuitive in how it handles following people across it’s many instances. RSS is great for following individual blogs as long as you have the necessary infrastructure in place (an account to act as a sync service and some apps to read in), but even then it’s not always easy to subscribe to the RSS feed of a website.

Go back a decade or so and browsers were heading in an interesting direction. Safari on the Mac had RSS built in and Firefox had a feature called live bookmarks. Both allowed you to “bookmark” a website and the browser would automatically use the RSS link it found on the site and notify you when there was an update. To me this is the most logical place to integrate RSS or a “follow” button for the internet. What was missing was some king of home page or feed akin to an RSS readers or that of Twitter. Browsers of today offer a great experience for browsing the open web, or at least starting a Google search and going from there. What I would like to see is a browser that places as much emphasis on bringing a social experience to the open web.

Imagine this… you are browsing the internet and come across a new blog, you’d like to follow it so you click the follow button in the header of that website. The UI of the website reflects that and your browser adds the website as website to it’s bookmarks. You close the browser and go off to do something else. A while later you come back, click on your browser icon and instead of being greeted by Google you are met with a feed reader type UI that shows you recent updates from the sites you follow. This is your curated space but it’s all tracked and kept in sync by your web browser not a social network. I think that would be an interesting way of handling social stuff on the web, the browser would be your home and not just a gateway to everything.

A little under four months ago I made a decision about my blog and moved it to use Ghost with the aim of building a more regular posting habit. Needless to say it hasn’t really happened. So I’ve decided to make another decision and go all in on Micro.blog.

Recently I’ve been on a slow and considered drive to simplify things in my life mostly in the digital realm, but not all of it. As a bit of a geek I’m prone to finding things, trying them out, or trying to build systems to enable me to do things. More often than not I abandon them (Notion, I’m looking at you) and return to something that does one thing well. For me it is Things for tasks, Craft for work notes, and Obsidian for my personal notes. There are no doubt other app of similar veins that don’t spring to mind right now.

Last week as I sat at my Mac a thought popped into my head. When I first started blogging back in 2005 the tools I was using were of a similar vein. At the time Wordpress was a much simpler blog focused CMS, there were no block editors or extra baggage to try and wrestle into submission. I could post quickly from my browser. Eventually I settled on using MarsEdit as my posting mechanism. It did exactly what I wanted allowing me to post to my blog without the need to fire up my browser. As I dwelt on that thought I realised that over time my blogging ideas have become more and more complicated. I wanted to create link posts, quote posts, or long form articles, all on a website that was well structured and looked good. Alongside that I had Twitter, and then ultimately Micro.blog. Small posts went into those places and soon enough I didn’t really know where I should post what. The resulting side effect? I stopped posting.

This saddened me. Blogging is a hobby, one I’ve invested a great deal of time, energy, and money into. I decided it was time to simplify. So I began looking around at setting Wordpress up again, then I realised, it’s too complicated and I need something simpler. So here I am. Micro.blog has more or less everything I want from a blogging engine. A simple posting engine, it looks good and I can customise it myself at a later date. So now I have one place to come when I want to post something. No matter what it is it will go here, one place to share what I want with as little friction as possible. Let’s see how it goes.

The last few years has seen the prolific rise of the content creator the people who create content for other people to consume. I dislike this phrase. I don’t like it for a few reasons, but the primary one is I don’t consume content and I hate to break it to you, but neither do you.

If you read books they are written by an author, someone who has taken a lot of time and expended a lot of energy in dedication to writing. Yet we don’t call books content, we recognise them for what they are. Why then do we call blog posts or articles published on the web content? It takes just as much time and energy to write a series of posts on a blog as it does to write a book. Those people are not writing content, they are also authors they just happen to author a website instead of a book. So lets call them authors or writers.

The same goes for video. We don’t classify TV programmes and films as content, they are made by teams of people including directors, actors, presenters, writers, sound engineers, editors, and many more that I’ve missed. Why then are YouTubers classified as content creators? Are they not film makers? More often that not they do all of the roles that whole teams do for films.

Likewise with podcasts, another form of “content” that I “consume”. The skill and effort that goes into producing a podcast is the same as the skill and effort that goes into producing a radio show. We listen to radio shows just as we do podcasts, we don’t consume them. Why then do we not call the people who create them by the terms they deserve? The people who make radio shows are referred to as DJ’s, presenters, or broadcasters. Why do we not use these terms to talk about people who create podcasts? They may not broadcast their shows by a signal and mast, but they are still broadcasting their shows for all to hear on the internet (just as most radio stations do today).

I think it’s time we started to move away from the generic terms we use to define people who create and publish things on the internet and instead start using the respected terms we have been using for decades in the more “traditional” industries. It does a disservice to the skills of those creators when the vast majority are very talented people and deserve the credibility that comes with proper names for their professions.

The last few years has seen the prolific rise of the content creator the people who create content for other people to consume. I dislike this phrase. I don’t like it for a few reasons, but the primary one is I don’t consume content and I hate to break it to you, but neither do you.

If you read books they are written by an author, someone who has taken a lot of time and expended a lot of energy in dedication to writing. Yet we don’t call books content, we recognise them for what they are. Why then do we call blog posts or articles published on the web content? It takes just as much time and energy to write a series of posts on a blog as it does to write a book. Those people are not writing content, they are also authors they just happen to author a website instead of a book. So lets call them authors or writers.

The same goes for video. We don’t classify TV programmes and films as content, they are made by teams of people including directors, actors, presenters, writers, sound engineers, editors, and many more that I’ve missed. Why then are YouTubers classified as content creators? Are they not film makers? More often that not they do all of the roles that whole teams do for films.

Likewise with podcasts, another form of “content” that I “consume”. The skill and effort that goes into producing a podcast is the same as the skill and effort that goes into producing a radio show. We listen to radio shows just as we do podcasts, we don’t consume them. Why then do we not call the people who create them by the terms they deserve? The people who make radio shows are referred to as DJ’s, presenters, or broadcasters. Why do we not use these terms to talk about people who create podcasts? They may not broadcast their shows by a signal and mast, but they are still broadcasting their shows for all to hear on the internet (just as most radio stations do today).

I think it’s time we started to move away from the generic terms we use to define people who create and publish things on the internet and instead start using the respected terms we have been using for decades in the more “traditional” industries. It does a disservice to the skills of those creators when the vast majority are very talented people and deserve the credibility that comes with proper names for their professions.

For the best part of the last year I’ve been all in on Obsidian for my note taking. I’ve enjoyed writing in it, seeing it evolve, and playing with it’s theming engine (a bit too much sometimes) but recently I’ve been finding a few issues that have been getting under my skin. The experience of using it on my Mac is fine, in fact it works very well especially when paired with my large external display. When it comes to the iPad and my iPhone though, the experience is way too different. No matter how good the theme is something never quite feels right about the way the app looks and more importantly, the way the app functions.

Whilst I don’t want to confuse motion with progress, I’ve decided it’s time to try another app. One that I’ve found myself coming back to multiple times and have used for one off projects in the last 12 months. I’ve decided it’s time to give Craft a try for my note making. I gave Obsidian at least a 12 month run, so it’s time to give Craft the same.

There’s several things which draw me to Craft, most prominently is it’s native to all the platforms I use. I might be sat at a Mac all day while I work, but when I’m not I use my iPad as my personal computer and it’s during this time when I do most of my note making. Craft’s iPad app is excellent and I’m enjoying using it. The second thing which draws me to the app are it’s integrations. It works with Shortcuts with out me having to think of clever workarounds to do what I want. It has built in actions to send text to Things and Ulysses so I can turn notes into blog posts. Finally, it has many of the features of Obsidian that matter to me. I can connect notes together and see what is linked to it from elsewhere. I have templates for note types that I can easily use to start a new note. The only thing it lacks at the moment is some form of graph view so I can visually see connections between my notes.

I’ve still to decide where to do my journalling. I was using Obsidian for that, but again, for the reasons I’ve already outlined I don’t want to continue. It might be time to revert to Day One on my iPad, but I may also give the daily notes of Craft a try. This is after all an experiment in implementing a note making method in a new app. It works for some, the question is, will it work for me?

For the best part of the last year I’ve been all in on Obsidian for my note taking. I’ve enjoyed writing in it, seeing it evolve, and playing with it’s theming engine (a bit too much sometimes) but recently I’ve been finding a few issues that have been getting under my skin. The experience of using it on my Mac is fine, in fact it works very well especially when paired with my large external display. When it comes to the iPad and my iPhone though, the experience is way too different. No matter how good the theme is something never quite feels right about the way the app looks and more importantly, the way the app functions.

Whilst I don’t want to confuse motion with progress, I’ve decided it’s time to try another app. One that I’ve found myself coming back to multiple times and have used for one off projects in the last 12 months. I’ve decided it’s time to give Craft a try for my note making. I gave Obsidian at least a 12 month run, so it’s time to give Craft the same.

There’s several things which draw me to Craft, most prominently is it’s native to all the platforms I use. I might be sat at a Mac all day while I work, but when I’m not I use my iPad as my personal computer and it’s during this time when I do most of my note making. Craft’s iPad app is excellent and I’m enjoying using it. The second thing which draws me to the app are it’s integrations. It works with Shortcuts with out me having to think of clever workarounds to do what I want. It has built in actions to send text to Things and Ulysses so I can turn notes into blog posts. Finally, it has many of the features of Obsidian that matter to me. I can connect notes together and see what is linked to it from elsewhere. I have templates for note types that I can easily use to start a new note. The only thing it lacks at the moment is some form of graph view so I can visually see connections between my notes.

I’ve still to decide where to do my journalling. I was using Obsidian for that, but again, for the reasons I’ve already outlined I don’t want to continue. It might be time to revert to Day One on my iPad, but I may also give the daily notes of Craft a try. This is after all an experiment in implementing a note making method in a new app. It works for some, the question is, will it work for me?